


the blood-dimmed tide

by kay_el



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Childhood, Families of Choice, Gen, Growing Up, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-29
Updated: 2013-09-29
Packaged: 2017-12-27 22:00:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/984102
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kay_el/pseuds/kay_el
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Growing up in the throes of the Kaiju War is a struggle, even for the most fearless child. This is a story of one girl building herself amid wreckage, and two scientists who helped her stay afloat.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the blood-dimmed tide

**Author's Note:**

> Beta'd by the ever lovely knaccfornerdiness over on tumblr.
> 
> Title is taken from William Butler Yeats' poem 'The Second Coming.'

Mako, twelve and knobby-kneed, trails her hand along a wall of the Hong Kong Shatterdome as she walks down each corridor. Each sound echoes in this place, and each wall stands just as tall as any other wall. Mako Mori purses her lips and chooses a turn at random. _Maybe this time._

Instead, she runs into another dead end, another round-about of offices or Jaeger equipment or closet-sized dormitories. She squeezes her hands into fists at her sides and breathes hard out of her nose.

Her feet tap out a frustrated sound on the solid metal floors, and she continues to glance back and forth, hunting for the familiar in a place that still, still doesn’t feel like home.

Without the Marshal, her feet stumble, her eyes narrow hopelessly and she goes in circles. This building, solid and strong and with the ability to send out six Jaegers at once if necessary, traps her when she’s alone. The city grabs her attention and holds her, could almost become a home if she let it. But she moves every eight months, the Marshal’s hand in hers and their eyes on the horizon. Two years so far, riding at his side in helicopters and military jets, and now Mako packs expertly, folds meticulously, clasps her hands behind her back and follows the Marshal’s feet with her smaller ones. Matches his steps. Keeps nothing she cannot guarantee she needs. Mako is the tide.

Hong Kong, though, to her eyes, is beautiful and frightening, the now-familiar Kaiju bones rising out of the glimmering skyscrapers. Hong Kong glitters and spits smoke, and Mako spends nights sitting by porthole windows that she gets lost trying to find again, watching the world exist beyond the glass, and the stars exist past even that.

She goes where the Marshal takes her, and she is grateful. He holds her when she cries, and sings her to sleep, and laughs gently when she stumbles; rights her again. He stands like a beacon in her darkness, and she hones in on him without a thought. Moth to a flame. The terrible, never-ending fight against the Kaiju leaves the rest of the world cheering and Mako’s stomach tied up in knots. It gives the Marshal headaches. Sick – so frighteningly sick sometimes – and restless, he leads the Rangers and their Jaegers with fists of steel and tight eyes. Mako, in turn, hides behind doors and pulls her shoes on by herself. She is the tide, and the tide doesn’t go through a cliff. It moves out of the way.

She wants, desperately, tangibly, in the palms of her hands and the base of her stomach, to help. To fight back. To claim the lives of these cruel monsters like they claimed the lives of her family.

But right now, she’d only be in the way. So she wanders the Shatterdome with her fingertips trailing along exposed pipes and cold metal, and gets lost over and over again. (They’ll move to Anchorage in another six months, and she will still only have a vague, ghost-like map of this place in her head.)

She turns a corner and hears yelling in English, harsh, sharp words thrown at each other. Despite herself, she’s curious. The yelling she’s heard from her father is loud and directed, booming and grounding. This is shrill and crass and crude. They use words she’s never heard before. They use words she’s only heard from Tendo or from the whispering mouths of pilots when they peel off scraped-up armor, when she hides behind concrete posts and watches the heroes return with wide, worshiping eyes.

Mako creeps up to the door, and she’s long since learned how to walk gently on the metal floors, even in her barely-fitting combat boots.

There are two white men standing a few feet from each other, their teeth bared and arms extended. Their gestures are as violent as their words. Mako grins with teeth, lets the violent words wash over her. Everyone is so quiet around her, like she’ll break – she’s too young, she’s too fragile, and sometimes someone will talk about a Kaiju and look at her like she might have a panic attack in front of them. They are all quiet and respectful and _quiet_.

It means she longs for energy, now. Her body, her mind, her words want to fight back. She wants to make people sit up and listen to her. She wants to command the room, and watch them spin and totter under her fingers. She wants the same power her father has.

She wants to control a Jaeger – she’s known it since she saw the Marshal rise out of his metal beast in the middle of the wreckage of Tokyo.

She’s still standing in the doorway, listening to these two men yell horrible things, one hand still held out, just grazing the doorframe.

One of them pauses, looking away, running a hand through his already objectionable hair, and spots her in the doorway. His eyes widen and he stammers something at her that she can’t understand.

“Sorry, what did you say?” she says politely, aware of her less-than-perfect English comprehension. Linguistics hadn’t been a number one priority for her so far.

The man’s companion swings around, leaning heavily on a cane.

The first man shakes his head. “I was just apologizing, Miss Mori. I didn’t. We didn’t.”

The second man rolls his eyes and approaches her. “We didn’t know you were here. Apologies for our behavior. I am Dr. Gottlieb. That’s,” his face screws up for a second in distaste, “Dr. Geiszler.”

Dr. Geiszler sticks his tongue out. “ _Wrong_. I’m Newt. That’s Hermann.” Dr. Gottlieb turns to glare at him, and Dr. Geiszler stares back, unrepentant. “She’s just a kid, Hermann. I think you can relax on the damn titles for one freaking minute.”

Dr. Gottlieb huffs in annoyance and turns back to Mako, who clasps her hands in front of her and smiles politely.

“I’m sorry for disturbing you, Dr. Gottlieb,” she says, bowing her head respectfully. He returns the nod, which she appreciates.

Newt makes an annoyed sigh. “Oh, look, now you’re corrupting the youth.”

Dr. Gottlieb leans closer to Mako, and whispers conspiratorially, “If there’s anyone doing any corrupting of youth, I’d keep your eyes on him, young lady.”

They both return to their previous activities, their fight effectively broken up by her presence. Newt sticks his blue-stained gloves back into a murky tank sitting on his desk. Dr. Gottlieb pulls himself back up onto his ladder, scraping chalk into numbers along the chalkboard.

The sounds aren’t soothing, not really. But Mako is lonely, and Newt has a relatively toxin-free chair sitting on the other side of his desk. She shuffles over and raises her eyebrows hopefully at him.

“Dr. Geiszler?”

“Newt,” he corrects without thinking, distracted by his work. She smiles hesitantly.

“Newt. May I stay here?”

He looks up at her, startled. “Here? Where here? _Why_ here?”

“I was wondering if I could sit here. I mean,” she stammers, “the Marshal is very busy, and I get lonely, and I was wondering if I could…” she trails off, uncertain.

A flicker of recognition passes across his face before Newt grins broadly at her, fingers still squishing around in what, Mako assumes, is probably part of a Kaiju. “Of course you can!”

Dr. Gottlieb makes a harrumphing sound from up on his ladder, and Newt tilts his head upwards, not actually turning around.

“Manners, Hermann. We can share the space with the boss’s daughter. I won’t even get any goo on her, I promise.”

Mako watches as Dr. Gottlieb purses his lips. “Miss Mori is not a _pet_ , Newton.” And then he sighs and his shoulders drop. “But, very well. But she must stay on my side of the room. God knows how many things could kill her over there.”

Newt opens his mouth to protest, then glances around himself thoughtfully. “You know, you do have a point.” He grimaces at her. “Sorry, kiddo. But,” he brightens, “if you get a hankering to check out a Kaiju spleen…”

“ _No_ , Newton.” Dr. Gottlieb doesn’t get down from the ladder, instead gesturing Mako towards his desk – which is, to be fair, significantly cleaner than anything on Newt’s side of the room.

Mako sits down with her hands in her lap and watches them work.

This eventually degenerates into her curling up in the chair with her knees under her chin, listening to Newt’s outrageous music and watching the numbers curl and crawl up and down Dr. Gottlieb’s chalkboard.

 

****

 

She comes back the next day, eventually, following some familiar corridors and only getting completely lost a couple of times. By the time she gets there, it’s lunch time, and Dr. Gottlieb has a mug of tea in both hands. He almost smiles at her when she walks in, and she gives him a little bow. Newt doesn’t look like he’s stopping for lunch anytime soon, but he brightens when he sees Mako.

“Oh good! I was worried we might have scared you off.”

“ _You_ ,” Dr. Gottlieb corrects, taking a careful bite of his sandwich. “ _You_ might have scared her off.”

Newt retaliates, his mouth wide and his hands splayed, almost spraying Kaiju-blue all over the room. Mako is still mostly invisible here, but there is sound everywhere, and the Doctors Gottlieb and Geiszler didn’t speak haltingly because they remembered how she looked under the shadow of Coyote Tango.

Mako sits down in a spare folding chair next to his desk and opens her lunchbox in her lap. It’s not much, considering the rationing, but Hong Kong’s open port means it’s automatically better than most of the lunches she’s had in the past year or two.

Their words are still harsh, still full of energy that makes her fingers tingle. She loves it, even (especially) if they’re angry, because she’s also angry. Mako feels so angry sometimes she thinks she could kill a Kaiju with her bare hands, feels like she could tear the oceans apart, could snap the rickety posts of her bed with her teeth. Their anger is so familiar by now, it feels like warmth in her chest. It almost feels like coming home.

 _They’re angry and afraid like me_ , she thinks, as she chews her rice and tilts her head. Newt says something furious in German, and it’s not beautiful, but it’s all they have.

 

Eventually, she realizes that they fight with each other because it’s a safe outlet for all that fury and fear. She understands it. She learns to cherish it.

 

****

 

Less than two weeks, and Mako has her own chair in the lab – a soft one that spins and reaches the desk. She learns how to avoid the Kaiju entrails that inevitable plaster themselves to the floor, and where Dr. Gottlieb keeps the chalk, and she’s starting to learn that Newt doesn’t really mind when she can’t keep up with his loud, relentless ramblings.

It’s a Wednesday, and the Marshal is off arguing with bureaucrats somewhere. Mako is fidgeting in her chair, tucking her hair behind her ears and spinning slowly. Dr. Gottlieb long since switched to German when yelling at Newt, who responds in kind. It makes her want to learn, because it feels angry. She doesn’t know if German is an angry language on its own, or if Newt and Dr. Gottlieb simply don’t know how to communicate without growling their vowels and spitting their consonants at each other.

Eventually, there is a shadow over her, and Mako glances up to see Dr. Gottlieb, looking impatient. (She thinks that might be his automatic expression, and tries not to take it personally.)

“Sorry, am I being disruptive?” she asks preemptively. _Please don’t say I’m in the way_ , she thinks desperately.

But he just smiles and shakes his head and puts some sheets of paper in front of her.

“You’re twelve years old, Mako, and while I recognize that you have plenty of time to learn, I cannot in good conscience let you continue without having a comprehensive understanding of mathematics.”

“I know math,” she says defensively, watching Newt make faces behind Dr. Gottlieb’s back. “The Marshal got someone to teach me.”

“Yes, well.” Dr. Gottlieb’s mouth goes straight and thin for a moment, like he disapproves. “I think we could expand that knowledge, don’t you think?”

He hands her a pencil.

When he walks away, she asks his back, “Dr. Gottlieb, will this help me pilot a Jaeger someday?”

He and Newt meet eyes across the room, and there’s a flicker of something in both of their faces that she can’t identify before it’s gone.

“Yes,” Dr. Gottlieb says eventually. Slowly, purposefully. “It helped us create them, and it will help you pilot them.”

She nods seriously and narrows her eyes at the math problems in front of her.

Quietly, so quietly she would have thought she had misheard him if Newt hadn’t dropped his current piece of Kaiju, Dr. Gottlieb mutters from his computer, “and you may call me Hermann, Mako.”

Newt’s eyes bulge in indignation. Mako just smiles.

 

The next day, Newt gives her biology worksheets, information about the Kaiju that’s a little bit disgusting and a whole lot interesting. She spends the entire afternoon with her cheek propped up by a hand, her paper covered in eraser shavings.

 

****

 

Newt finds her wandering the base, five months into living there, and places a gentle hand on her shoulder. She jumps and twirls, fists raised, before she recognizes him.

“Woah there, kiddo. It’s just me.”

She sighs and leans into him, her head still meeting just above his elbow. He stills for a moment before his arm hugs her around the shoulders. “Sorry, Newton. It’s been a long day.”

“Oh? You want to talk about it?”

He nudges her forward, and his hand slides from her shoulders. They walk together.

“I don’t know,” she decides. “But…” she bites her lip, “can you help me find the cafeteria?”

Newt laughs and ruffles her hair. “Sure. It’s pretty easy to get lost here, isn’t it?”

Mako blushes and ducks her head. He grins and nudges her with an elbow.

“Don’t worry, Miss Mori. Hermann’s been on my ass about eating anyways, so I’ll get something to eat too.”

She looks up at him. “He’s right, you know.”

“Huh?”

“You don’t take care of yourself. It worries him.”

Newt snorts. “Who, Hermann? Nah. If I passed out, he’d probably just complain about the noise of me falling over.”

Mako rolls her eyes and tucks her hands into her pockets. “Well, it worries _me_.”

He looks chastened and actually eats something. She smiles at him and slips an apple into his hand before heading back to find the Marshal.

 

****

 

By the time they pack up and leave for Anchorage, Mako’s completed every worksheet Hermann and Newt have put in front of her, and she can recite the periodic table backwards and forwards.

It feels like power in her hands, knowing these things. She’s starting to learn how the Kaiju work, and more importantly, how the Jaegers work.

Hermann downloads a great amount of both his and Newt’s research from the PPDC’s K-Science division onto a tablet for her, and she scrolls through it aimlessly on the plane from Hong Kong to Alaska.

Hermann had been surprised when she pulled him into a hug, though she’d been careful to balance him when he stumbled. He had held her tight for a moment before pressing a palm to her head and stepping back.

Newt had been expecting it, and lifted her off the floor when she barreled into him. They had laughed, and he had made her promise to call them or email, at least, just so he didn’t go crazy with just this guy to keep him company.

Mako sighs and leans back into her seat, rests her cheek on the Marshal’s rough coat and breathes in the smell of rainwater and salt water that lingers on his shoulders.

She will miss them. But duty calls.

 

****

 

They correspond via email for a year. Newt calls her _Kleines_ and kiddo and sweetie in his messages, peppering his reports on his research and welfare with dubious smiley faces and an intimidating amount of capslock. He’s the only person who sees her un-edited messages from when she wakes up shaking at two in the morning and sends him something. Anything. And he sends her things back, full of cat pictures and dumb selfies and chatspeak that she struggles to translate. He gets it, she thinks. There’s something that she hasn’t tried to figure out, but he understands that, when she’s inches from a panic attack, she doesn’t remember how to spell Jaeger or Anchorage or peanut butter.

Sometimes he skypes her, then, when it’s 1 in the morning in Alaska and dinnertime in Hong Kong, and he’ll be eating a sandwich, muttering to himself and elbow-deep in Kaiju remains with his camera balanced on a stack of books. He’ll ramble to her about science and biology and results, about the complexity of the Kaiju skeletal structure and what they served for lunch that day.

Hermann steals the camera away when it falls over, muttering to himself in German, and talks her down from the precipice, soothing words in English and poorly-accented Japanese that help her to breath again.

 

****

 

She realizes they’re family when she calls them after Gipsy Danger goes down. They’re back in Alaska, and she’s never loved the cold, and the Marshal knows because his hand tightened on her shoulder when he told her where they were going next. It’s a jolt, going from Lima back to Anchorage, but she squared her shoulders and headed back to her room to pack. Like the tide.

She’s eighteen and wearing her hair long and red-streaked and pulled back in a ponytail, and her hands shake on the phone while her father tries desperately to pull off damage control. She’s tucked in the back of the control room, and everyone but Tendo, who shoots her anxious glances when he thinks she’s not looking, has long since forgotten she’s there.

Newt and Hermann moved together, a year ago, and they’re back in LA now. She calls them and they’re working – of course they’re working, screaming at the top of their lungs and so close to blows Mako fears for them both sometimes. But they go quiet when she talks, both leaning together over the phone, and she’s shaking, she’s shaking so hard.

“Gipsy’s down.” She whispers. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The Jaegers were invincible. Power and strength and heroes behind every metallic shield, and now they’re _gone_. She wraps a hand around her waist and hears Hermann swear hard in German, and Newt in English, and then they trade languages, and Newt follows it with an impressive tirade in Mandarin. She gulps in a breath and Hermann’s voice is soft when he says, “I’m so sorry, Mako.”

She hiccups another breath and leaves the room, before Tendo can look at her again with those sad, sad eyes. Before her father turns and frowns and wraps a hand around her shoulder like he’s carrying her weight too, on top of everything else.

“I didn’t even know them,” she says eventually, over the line of the phone, “I didn’t know the Beckets, but the Kaijus…” She trails off, voice wobbling.

“They’re getting bigger.” Newt fills in, because he knows she doesn’t like it when they gloss over things for her sake. They all know this is bigger than the three of them. “They’re getting better, too.”

“Tell me it’s going to be okay,” she whispers, and this is the last time she lets herself be this weak, her eyelashes wet with tears and her heart thudding hard in her chest.

Hermann sighs, and Newt sighs, and she can see them shaking their heads from thousands of miles away.

“I can’t, dear girl,” Hermann says at last, and he sounds defeated.

“But, Mako,” Newt’s voice is desperate, but it’s angry. Mako knows what to do with angry, and she listens hard. “Mako, this is why we’re fighting. We’re not going to let them destroy us.”

Mako’s shoulders tighten, and she stands up straighter. “You’re right.” Her voice is silence and steel. “Saving the world comes with casualties.”

“But as few as we can manage,” Newt adds.

It feels like everything just got heavier.

 

****

 

Jaegers get beaten down, pilots die, the Kaiju get stronger, better, and there are flames and smoke and screams all along the coast lines. Mako can feel it in her bones that this is only the beginning. The beginning of something far worse than San Francisco and Manila. It makes her want to hide.

Instead, she becomes a warrior. Her body is strong and furious, and she spends the next five years learning how to operate a Jaeger from the inside out. She knows how it works – she’s studied everything in that tablet from Hermann a thousand times. She could diagram a Kaiju in her sleep. She could rebuild a Jaeger’s insides with one hand tied behind her back.

But now, she turns to swords and staffs, punching her way through the simulations like there’s no other option but victory, finding success in the wreckage of the world.

Destroying Kaiju, even virtual ones, is cathartic. It rests in her shoulders when she can’t sleep, that feeling of strength against a greater foe, and she lets that anger settle her brain enough to sleep.

She holds onto things too hard, keeps her head down and tends to her father and flips through reports when he isn’t looking. She’s the smartest person in the Jaeger academy, but she doesn’t get to stay long before they start shutting things down.

 

Her one consolation is that Hermann and Newt are as furious about it as she and her father are.

 

****

 

It’s been five years since that shaky phone call from Anchorage to Los Angeles, and the Marshal is bringing in Raleigh Becket to raise his old Jaeger from the ashes. It feels wrong, it feels wonderfully wrong. They’re the resistance, they’re the last people standing, the defenders of the Earth. And Raleigh Becket isn’t a wingman. She knows this, knows it in her blood somewhere.

She and her two scientists are back together, shoved into the same Shatterdome where they met.

This time, Hermann isn’t surprised when she hugs him tight, burying her face in his chest and laughing when he inspects the color in her hair. (Blue and cut at her chin. Easier.) Newt still lifts her off her feet in a hug. Calls her kiddo again, just to see her narrow her eyes at him. He ruffles her hair and wraps his arm around her shoulders and makes faces at Hermann as they get settled. They draw a line down the middle of the room, and Mako wonders, in the back of their mind, why they don’t ask for two labs. Surely, surely they have the room now.

But she doesn’t ask. She sits in Hermann’s chair as he starts scratching his equations into the chalkboards on the walls. Newt’s side of the room is all glass tanks and oozing, and he beams at her when she can identify each organ. They share lunch and drink moonshine at three in the afternoon, and this time, this time Mako looks at their work and is awed by it. She knows it now, well enough, at least, to see the brilliance in the details of it all.

 

Raleigh is nothing like she expected. She loves him and she hates him, and she wants to be his copilot so much it leaves a permanent ache in her chest. It’s awful, and when the Marshal calls it vengeance, he’s simplifying the driving force behind her entire life, and he can’t feel the buzzing in her skull when she’s standing next to Raleigh, looking at his old Jaeger. But she can, and she knows, she knows, she knows.

They’re drift compatible, and he’s her copilot, and she’s angry at him for it. But, then, it’s been her default emotion for so long, she doesn’t put much stock into it anymore.

She doesn’t like Raleigh Becket, not yet. He’s rash and impulsive and he talks back to the Marshal. But god, she hopes she’s wrong.

 

And then she fucks it up. And then she watches it all fall down around her.

 

She can’t look in her father’s eyes. His eyes, which tell her he was right, she wasn’t ready, she’s let him down. It stings so hard. It tears her up, and she can barely find the words to ask for a dismissal.

She doesn’t stop for Raleigh. (But she doesn’t hate him anymore. She doesn’t hate him like she doesn’t hate the ocean. He’s there, and he’s insurmountable, and he’s riotously beautiful and unfathomable and she wants to scratch her name into his chest with her teeth and curl up there, among his other scars. She wants to join him in a Jaeger and never, never leave. And she never wants to get in a Jaeger again, because she can’t see that look on her father’s face.)

 

Hermann doesn’t ask when she buries herself in his chest, his cane clattering to the side and his arms coming up to circle her shoulders. He doesn’t ask, because he knows – everybody knows. Fuck, _everybody knows_.

It’s like everything has been torn apart inside of her.

Hermann’s hand is on her back, between her shoulder blades, grounding her, when she pulls her head up and swallows down an apology. He and Newt have seen her worse than this. (Have they? Have they really?) Hermann smiles gently at her and cups her cheek, tells her Pentecost still loves her, tells her it’s not her fault.

And when she pulls back, he says “go to him,” and she knows that he’s not talking about the Marshal. She just knows.

 

Raleigh is a comfort, and she’s not sure why. She thinks he may have been built that way – all sweetness and warmth and ridiculously cut abs. But he is a comfort, and she is grateful.

 

****

 

The world doesn’t end.

 

The world doesn’t end, but her father is gone. And it feels like she’s still drowning, even after Raleigh breathes again ( _thankgodthankgodthankgod_ ) and they come back to the Shatterdome in helicopters.

Hermann and Newt drifted with a Kaiju, she hears the minute they get back, and she’s only shocked still for a moment before rushing towards them in an uncoordinated, clunky jumble of booted feet and armored knees.

She pushes her face into Newt’s neck, wraps her arms around his shoulders, when she finds him. Hermann is standing next to him, their hands perpetually laced together. Raleigh is two inches away from her, and she can feel him like a vein, pulsing and jittery by her side. She breathes into Newt’s blood-spotted, dirt-streaked shirt and coughs out a breath that doubles as a curse. His hands rest on her back and his voice is a hum in her ear.

He doesn’t say it’s okay. And she knows he won’t, because they don’t lie to her.

Hermann rests one arm around her shoulders and wraps the other around Newt’s waist, and they are the three of them a single grieving mass for a few moments. The crowd parts around them, even in the ecstatic hubbub of triumph. Their pain is palpable.

Hercules Hansen left, fled through the raucous corridors of the Shatterdome and found solitude, because he is a strong man, but even strong men can be broken.

Mako will find him later, will take some of his burdens and hold his hands as he shakes out silent tears – no one else understood the sharpness of losing Stacker Pentecost as the two of them did.

She too will find a place, eventually, where it doesn’t hurt so constantly. Where it thrums like a bruise on her chest, but doesn’t shock her like she’s been hit by lightening, or choke her in her sleep. Eventually.

But for now, she lets her two scientists hold her like she is a child again, as her body shakes with the unspeakable tragedy of it all, even in victory. Because her world was both saved and leveled in the same instant, and she will never be the same again.

Still, she pulls back, and they breathe together, their ramshackle family formed through panicked emails and printed-out worksheets in dimly lit labs. And Raleigh is there with a hand squeezing hers.

It’s not much.

But it might be enough for now.


End file.
